I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; No-Man are Britain’s most underrated sorrowful sonic architects. At least as good as prime Talk Talk, singer Tim Bowness and multi-instrumentalist Steven Wilson (also a mainstay of Porcupine Tree) embrace the elegies of Eno (though it’s Roger of that name who guests here), Sylvian, Glass, Blue Nile, and, oh, anything with the word “blue” in it.

Tracks on their fifth full album build from gentle melancholy to sturm-und-drang magniloquence, bemoaning crumbled love or just muttering about everyday ennui. “You talk so fast to stop yourself from thinking/You move so fast so you’ll never see you’re sinking. “No-Man here take things slowly, stay afloat.

Already eulogised among Rolling Stone’s Best Albums Of 2002, and known for his guest appearance on the Roots’ Phrenology, this is an awesome declaration of intent from Californian singer/songwriter Cody ChesnuTT. Although decidedly lo-fi, this epic, adventurous and mischievous album bears comparison with Prince and Todd Rundgren (at their respective peaks).

Rockers like “Upstarts In A Blowout” achieve what Kravitz and D’Arby have spent years striving for. While there are occasional dubious comments about women (“Bitch, I’m Broke”), these are exquisitely balanced by desolate ballads (“The Make Up”) and psychotic electro (“The World Is Coming To My Party”). Though it may be hard to track down, it’ll be worth it: this is an album of the year.

The thing about real class is that it isn’t ostentatious: it just glows there till you notice it, confident that, sooner or later, you will. And if you don’t it’s your loss. The Pretenders’ first since 1999’s Viva El Amour is an album that, on first listen, glides by doing nothing wrong. Second time around, you realise that, more accurately, it’s doing everything right, and you’re spellbound.

But I’m making it sound polished and ‘tasteful’. That’d be crap: it’s got it going on. Chrissie Hynde knows what she’s doing after 20-odd years at the top. After a while as world’s best band, then a spell of being not quite sure how to ‘mature’, The Pretenders are now ‘just’ a device for Hynde to keep writing and singing songs, which is all we need, and we need it bad. She was driving new rock and no-cock revolutions back when it cost you something. Perhaps if that voice was less distinctive, she’d be namechecked more often, credited for more copyists. But few are dumb enough to try to ape her.

So it’s the still-swoonsome, breathy, resonant voice which raises the bar on “Time” and “You Know Who Your Friends Are”. Here, rhythms hint at slow funk and reggae, but on “Kinda Nice, I Like It” and “I Should Of” we’re reminded of the early, rocking Pretenders. The latter’s a string-soaked stormer, a reflection of love akin to “Talk Of The Town”, and including the lines: “When we made love, sometimes it was great/But just once or twice, I would’ve called it second rate.” Imagine the 88 front covers any new gal who came up with that today would garner. Miaow.

The cover of All Seeing I’s “Walk Like A Panther” is as feline as you’d hope, and the ferocious fuck-you opener, “Lie To Me”, cut off in its prime, is wicked. The showstopper, however, is “The Losing”, an Eddie & Ernie-meet-Tindersticks tearjerker of flawlessly-drawn pathos and soul.

The Pretenders remain the real thing. Sheer class, but never afraid to get its heart dirty.

A curio for Oldham completists, Slitch is a double-sided disc featuring a DVD movie (Slitch, co-starring Oldham) and, on the flip, half an hour of music composed for it by Oldham and old associate Pajo, bunking off from his day job in Billy Corgan’s Zwan. Pajo, it seems, has the upper hand here, with a bunch of post-folk instrumentals, alternately lulling and unnerving, similar to his first solo work as Aerial M. The last two numbers, however, barrel into new territory for both men, being blokey and ramshackle punkers fronted by Oldham’s unrecognisable bellow. Flaky, but diverting.

Some see Lil’ Kim’s inversion of thuggish male posturing (exemplified on her best-known cut, “Suck My Dick”) as radical, but ultimately there’s nothing more counter-productive than a macho woman. As Kim’s followed double-platinum success by “landing the coveted role of spokesmodel for Mac Cosmetics”, you’ll forgive us for doubting the authenticity of this former puppet of B.I.G. and Puffy. The Notorious one is still credited as exec-producer here, even though he’s, like, dead. A run of foul-mouthed, egocentric rhymes and nondescript beats is relieved only by “Can’t Fuck With Queen Bee”, sampling Deniece Williams’ “Free”. Between cameos from 50 Cent and Missy, there are brief ‘skits’ about farting. Not good.

Everyone needs a little Mathis James Reed in their lives, and this reissue of the 1958 Vee Jay disc is a great place to rectify any omission. Not just a guitar genius but a true giant of rock’n’roll vocalese, Reed’s repertoire informed the white boy R&B and pop school as surely as did Chuck Berry’s. Plug in here for “Go On To School”, “You Got Me Crying” and welcome finds like “High And Lonesome” and the countrified and funky “She Don’t Want Me No More”. Vital sounds.

DEATH CERTIFICATE

THE PREDATOR

LETHAL INJECTION

ALL EMI

After an acrimonious split from NWA in 1989, LA’s Ice Cube recruited East Coast pioneers The Bomb Squad to produce his solo debut, 1990’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. This resulted in a brilliantly wound-up, pissed-off album that found Sadler and Shocklee’s hypertense kineticism pushed to new heights and an on-point Cube flinging hatred in all directions: It’s also indecently funny?the chorus of “Fuck You, Ice Cube!” on “The Nigga Ya Love To Hate” still raises a sardonic chuckle. Death Certificate (1991) was a time-marking exercise, albeit a bruising one which now includes the crucial “Kill At Will” EP (featuring ghetto lament “Dead Homiez”) but ’92’s classic The Predator marks Cube’s greatest achievement to date. A flawlessly paced and produced album which grudgingly acknowledges light (“It Was A Good Day”) as well as dark (“Now I Gotta Wet ‘Cha”), today it stands alongside Cypress Hill’s “Black Sunday” as a pinnacle of early ’90s gangstadelia. Lethal Injection (1993) unfortunately upped the misogyny quota?see “Cave Bitch”?and by this time Cube’s head had been turned by Hollywood and the music shifted into second place. Shame.

WHO’S NEXT

BOTH POLYDOR

Originally released in 1966, A Quick One was The Who’s second album, designed to showcase the writing talents of the band, each of whom contribute songs. The stand-out track was the nine-minute mini opera “A Quick One, While He’s Away”, a sort of trial run for Tommy. Available here for the first time in remastered stereo, it also features various contemporary B-sides and most of the Ready Steady Who EP. Who’s Next (1971), which defined the group’s live set for the 1970s, here reappears in a two-disc Deluxe Edition, including a 75-minute live concert recorded at the Young Vic. The main album comes with six bonus tracks, plus extensive notes and new graphics. Top value, great music.

Ben Watt

NORTH MARINE DRIVE

BOTH CHERRY RED

In 1982, Thorn and Watt were Hull University students, both signed to the southern indie Cherry Red though, amazingly, they hadn’t met. That year, Watt recorded North Marine Drive for

THE MOD GENERATION

THE SKINHEAD GENERATION

THE NORTHERN SOUL GENERATION

THE SOUL BOY GENERATION

THE MOD REVIVAL GENERATION

THE RARE GROOVE GENERATION

THE ACID JAZZ GENERATION

ALL CASTLE

It’s difficult to picture the youth of 2003 mustering up the audacity to walk the streets dressed like Edwardian gents with sculpted duck’s arse hair-dos dripping with pomade while tottering on soles as thick as tractor tyres. Today, kids play ‘beat-em-ups’ on X-Boxes. Back then, they rumbled for real. So we’d like to believe anyway.

There will always be something richly romantic about the benchmark youth cults?the teds, the mods, the northern soul boys. On the surface all hemlines and haircuts, there was still plenty of musical passion behind the elitist fashions as demonstrated on these eight accompanying compilations to the S.O.U.L. TV documentary series. Nearly all exemplify young English white kids’ love affair with black music, be it the Skinheads’ appropriation of Jamaican ska, the northern soul crowd’s debt to East Coast R&B, the ’70s soul boy and rare groove sets’ shift towards funk and finishing with the ’80s acid jazz gang’s reinvention of Blue Note and hip hop as a man-made genre unto itself. Like aural dictionary definitions, these discs do a grand job of marking out each generation’s stylistic boundaries, aided by series producer Eddie Piller’s instructive sleeve notes.

Personal preference will, of course, be dictated by one’s own gang allegiance, though it’s hard not to recommend the excellent Mod CD or even its somewhat farcical sequel showcased on 1979’s Mod Revival (Secret Affair’s ridiculous “Time For Action” included). But nothing really tops The Teddy Boy Generation. Its opening hat-trick of Vince Taylor (the original “Brand New Cadillac”, even better than The Clash’s cover), Hank Mizell (“Jungle Rock”) and Johnny Burnette is simply unbeatable. Who needs the New Rock Revolution when the old one sounds this good?

Turning the post-’70s Love albums Out Here and False Start into a slimline disc is an exercise that will only appeal to the most completist Arthur Lee devotee, although liner note snaps of hard-to-find singles are a teaser. This Love Mk III arrived with the premise that the musicians couldn’t stand recreating Forever Changes et al, hardly likely to endear them to anyone now. Even so, the funky blues cul-de-sac isn’t the only direction. “Willow Willow”, “I Still Wonder” and “Stand Out” are archetypal sweet Lee moments; the Hendrix collaboration, “The Everlasting First”, recorded at London’s Olympic Studios, is no great shakes.

Beyond My Bloody Valentine, much of the silvery dreampop of the early ’90s has aged badly:hamstrung by insensitive productions; superseded by electronic solipsists. A pleasure, then, to discover how well Kitchens Of Distinction stand up. Julian Swales’ multi-dimensional guitar washes are still transporting, but it’s their zeal, humanity and surging tunes which really shine through in 2003. That, and the fact current New York darlings Interpol often sound like a KOD tribute band. Shame, though, that openly gay singers like Patrick Fitzgerald remain scarce in the covertly homophobic world of indie rock.

GRATEFUL DEAD

ANTHEM OF THE SUN

AOXOMOXOA

LIVE/DEAD

WORKINGMAN’S DEAD

AMERICAN BEAUTY

GRATEFUL DEAD [LIVE]

EUROPE ’72

HISTORY OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD VOL 1 (BEAR’S CHOICE)

ALL RHINO

When Jerry Garcia died in a drug treatment facility in California on August 9, 1995, most people assumed the Grateful Dead’s “long, strange trip” was surely over. Without Garcia, it was argued, the heart and soul of the Dead had passed away.

That wasn’t the entire case. The huge body of live and studio work they’d left behind had been an on-the-road legacy; now it became their salvation. All of these albums were available in the 2001 ‘coffin box set’, which retailed at around the

Dipping into the rarities bag, this 14-track compilation of soul and funk duets is designed to appeal to hardcore collectors rather than the general audience. Some of the tracks indeed are so rare that they have been transferred to disc from vinyl complete with obtrusive surface noise. Relative sound levels are likewise very roughly calculated. Among the participants are James Brown and Marva Whitney, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, Ray Charles and Lillian Ford, and, amazingly, Peters and Lee. Strictly for specialists only.

Picture the wooden shack stove and pull up a rocking chair for this splendid reissue of 1959’s disc, augmented with a different take on “I’m So Worried Baby” and a chilled-out “Unfriendly Woman”. Remarkably prescient blues sounds live here in the shape of Hooker classics like “Dimples”, “Crawlin’ King Snake” (as covered by The Doors) and the standard “Boogie Chillun”.

It’s a quiet storm of controlled chaos from the man who put the grits in the Grammies.

Putting the techno into technology, Mute’s electronic sub-label are releasing this meaty compilation of rarities and former 12-inch singles in both 16-track CD and 28-track MP3 format. But who gives a fuck where the sound comes from, the only valid test is: does it rock? And yes, it mostly does, from the sci-fi Tardis whooshes of Umek to the beatific glitch’n’glide of Luke Slater, and from SI Futures’ sublime Kraftwerk pastiche “Eurostar” to the glistening Moroderesque pulses of 1st Bass. Quality and diversity prevail, with old-guard names like Derrick May and Nitzer Ebb holding their own against younger acid kids. Akufen’s blistering remix of Cabaret Voltaire’s “Nag Nag Nag”, for example, still sounds like disco-punk musique concr